We've
talked on the phone several times, but when I had an almost-free day last week
I thought it was time to talk with Chalmers Johnson face to face. His 2000 book
Blowback:
The Costs and Consequences of American Empire(Henry Holt Metropolitan,
now in an Owl books paperback, $15.00, 266 pp.) was selling well before September
11 and has sold steadily since. But while he has made a few media appearances
since then and done a fair amount of lecturing on college campuses and elsewhere,
he has also been criticized  including by some Antiwar.com readers who
took exception to the interview I did with him just after the World Trade Center-Pentagon
attack.

The
burden of most of the criticism is that he comes across as an apologist for
the terrorists and such an aggressive critic of U.S. foreign policy as to almost
lapse over into the "we deserved it" or "we brought it on ourselves"
category. I don't think that's a fair criticism. Mr. Johnson published his book
more than a year before September 11, and in it he predicted unspecified but
unpleasant consequences for the United States because of the enmity and dislike
(justified or not) engendered by our continuing intense involvement in the affairs
of other nations overseas. Predicting that actions will have consequences is
hardly the same as making a moral judgment about whether they should have consequences
or whether consequences are justified.

DOING
POLITICAL SCIENCE

The
slender, mild-mannered 71-year-old who greeted me at the door of his house in
Cardiff, a coastal town north of San Diego, hardly looked as if he should stir
controversy. He sort of retired from the political science faculty at the University
of California, San Diego, where he had arrived in 1988 to head the Asian Studies
department, after a lifetime at UC Berkeley.

He
started there as a student in 1949 and after serving in the Navy and getting
an MA and a PhD went on to head the Chinese Studies and political science departments.
He has written books on the emergence of communist power in China, several on
MITI and the Japanese "economic miracle," a widely used text called
"Revolutionary Change," and on other aspects of modern Asian politics
and history, earning a fairly widespread reputation as a thoughtful and innovative
scholar of Asian affairs.

(Having
been a political science major myself I'm not often impressed by people with
political science degrees or credentials. They vary enormously in quality and
intelligence. All too many share the common social-science jealousy of the "hard"
sciences, which leads them to want to find aspects of their studies that are
quantifiable in numbers, often enough buying the illusion of scientific respectability
at the expense of any semblance of real understanding of the complexities of
what should be but hardly ever is a nuanced master discipline of human behavior.)

FROM
SPOOK TO SKEPTIC?

Chalmers
Johnson makes no secret of the fact that he served as a consultant to the CIA
between 1967 and 1973, and that during those heady times on campus he was a
fierce opponent of campus anti-war demonstrators, whom he viewed as "self-indulgent
as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework."
He says now that he was a "spear carrier for the empire," but an informed
one. In his book (I haven't read it all and will report more thoroughly when
I have), he tells this story:

"One
day at the height of the protests, I went to the university library to check
out what was then available to students on Vietnamese communism, the history
of communism in East Asia, and the international Communist movement. I was surprised
to find that all the major books were there on the shelves, untouched. The conclusion
seemed obvious to me then: these students knew nothing about communism and had
no interest in remedying that lack. They were defining the Vietnamese Communists
largely out of their own romantic desires to oppose Washington's policies. As
it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of
a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something
essential about the nature of America's imperial role in the world that I had
failed to perceive."

Johnson
had the not-uncommon experience of a reasonably informed scholar, noting that
perceptions and policies were often at odds with what those with a great deal
of knowledge believed to be happening  take the American opening to China
at about the time China was at its most despotic phase  often through
his career. But he really began rethinking his worldview and perception of the
American role in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union.

As
he told the UC magazine California Monthly in a September 2000 interview
(he said much the same to me but I wasn't taking notes): "It's that with
the end of the Cold War  the disappearance of the Soviet Union 
the United States did not dismantle its Cold War apparatus, particularly in
East Asia. If anything, it tended to shore it up. And the fact that we continue
to maintain this Cold War apparatus  particularly in East Asia, which
is the main area of my research  has caused me to look back on the Cold
War in a new light, to study it with a different perspective. And this has led
me to a much more critical stance toward American foreign policy."

THREE
COLD WARS

Viewing
recent history of which he had been a student and in some ways a participant
led him to believe "There was not just one Cold War. There were at least
three. The one in Europe was concerned with democracy versus totalitarianism,
and we were on the right side there. That one's over."

In
Asia, however, Johnson believed that in the context of what was perceieved as
a worldwide anti-communist mission, the U.S. short-changed the effort to democratize
Japan and other east Asian countries and sought to turn them into satellites
instead  in a similar fashion to the way the Soviet Union turned most
of Eastern Europe into satellites. That placed us on the wrong side of history
in a part of the world where the chief issue was shaking off dependence on foreign
imperialist powers. In East Asia we defended or became the imperialist powers
and fought and lost two wars  Korea and Vietnam.

"Then
a third Cold War is the one that went on in an area of our traditional imperialist
influence, Latin America." Johnson told California Monthly. "Using
the excuse of an anti-American revolt in Cuba against Batista, we engaged in
all sorts of activities, leading to genocide, as it's now been identified, in
the 1980s, in Guatemala and Nicaragua. This imperialism is still going on at
the present time, as we see with the huge new expenditures of funds to buy weapons
to carry on an allegedly anti-drug war in Colombia. It's considerably more than
just an anti-drug war."

RECOGNIZING
EMPIRE

Johnson
describes "blowback," an old CIA term about the unintended consequences
of operations. "This refers to the unintended consequences of American
policies abroad, including policies that are kept secret from the American public.
In the world today any number of Americans can wander into an imperial scenario
they know nothing about, but which could have truly lethal consequences for
them."

Given
his interest in East Asia, it is hardly surprising that Chalmers Johnson has
been a leading researcher into the situation on Okinawa, site of the last and
the bloodiest battle of World War II. It has 1.3 million people and 39 American
military bases, none of which has a thing to do with geopolitical strategy.

Johnson
thinks U.S. bases are kept in Okinawa because they've been there a long time,
they've become an American habit and  as with service in East Germany
for the old Soviet military  American military personnel can live better
there than in many domestic military bases. But there have been numerous incidents
of rape and/or assault by U.S. servicemen and most Okinawans are extremely resentful
of the U.S. presence (although a probably unhealthy percentage of the Okinawan
economy has become fairly dependent on it).

Johnson
writes about U.S. military presence in several countries in Europe, including
Italy, "a nation that has no known enemies," where a U.S. military
jet accident killed 20 innocent skiers. "What I've tried to do in my book
is to put together some of these incidents. They add up to a pattern, a pattern
that I think the correct analytical word for is imperialism."

A
DELIGHTFUL AFTERNOON

Along
with his charming wife Sheila, also a PhDed academic, Chalmers Johnson and I
talked of many things, including the history of the Orange County Register and
the history and ideological genealogy of Antiwar.com, which he consults regularly.
We hardly agreed on everything  he has more confidence in the possibilities
of foreign aid, international institutions and planning than I think is warranted
 but we found plenty of common ground. He has thought deeply about a wide
range of issues and I look forward to our next encounter.

Chalmers
Johnson says he is writing a new book on the militarization of the United States
and other topics. I hope he finishes it quickly and that it has a wide readership.
In the meantime, I recommend "Blowback" highly as a penetrating perspective
on recent American history. Far from being an anti-American screed or a work
that seems to revel in the possibility that America will "get what's coming
to it," the book seems to me a warning about consequences from an earnest,
troubled, disappointed but ultimately hopeful patriot.